Hermann Hesse

Published in 1927 for Hermann Hesse’s fiftieth birthday, Hugo Ball’s Hermann Hesse: Sein Leben und sein Werk is one of the earliest major portraits of the author of Demian, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Beneath the Wheel. Ball follows Hesse from the Pietist world of Calw and Basel through Maulbronn, apprenticeship, literary struggle, marriage, war, crisis, and the move south to Ticino. The biography is especially strong on Hesse’s family atmosphere: missionary Protestantism, Swabian Pietism, the maternal world, childhood fear, nature, music, fairy tale, folk song, and the pressure of education and religious duty. Ball does not write as a detached academic critic. He reads Hesse as a spiritual and artistic figure: the last heir of Romanticism, a poet of childhood and inwardness, and a modern man caught between religious inheritance, rebellion, analysis, and the collapse of European civilization. Written shortly before Ball’s own death, this biography remains a revealing document of Hesse’s early reception and of Ball’s late religious-literary criticism.